HOW gratifying to see U2's Bono feted in Sarajevo, talking to journalists and politicians and being that wondrous thing, a celebrity. The one time I met that gentleman, I was just back from my third trip to Sarajevo. He expressed no interest in the place. Perhaps because I was a mere Irish Times journalist, I was not worth the effort of conversation. Or there might have been pique involved. I know that our meeting was some time after he had made satellite phone calls from the stage through to the besieged city, though I was unaware of that at the time of the calls. Bill Graham of Hot Press had asked me, on my return, what impact the phone calls had on the citizens of Sarajevo.
Since I hadn't heard of them, since nobody in the city seemed to have heard of them, since nobody I met mentioned them to me, and not even the heroic staff of Oslobodjenje referred to these gallant phone calls, made no doubt in the most trying conditions - Hello there, Sarajevo it's me in the middle of a really important concert in Los Angeles, we're with you in spirit, brothers and sisters, how are things right now? - I could only say that they had made no impact at all. Perhaps that's: why Bono preferred not to speak to me when we met. Or perhaps he knows a bore when he meets one.
Global Warming
I noticed he was wearing his dark glasses in Sarajevo the other day. He blamed it on the late night. I blame it on global warming. Makes you do odd things, global warming, such as talking about ending it.
One of the mysteries of our time is not why Mr Hewson wears dark glasses all the time, but that global warming is seen as a bad thing. What rubbish. Spring of last year was a joy, the summer which followed turned Ireland into something approaching a paradise. Recently we have had the first real winter anybody can remember for decades.
And this is a bad thing? Seasons which are seasonal, which fall to the rhythms we expect, instead of the dreary, grey continuum which we experienced in 1994 of an unidentifiable, characterless and bleak spring followed by an identical summer and autumn. Seasonally seasonal seasons are surely things to be cherished, their cause celebrated and revered.
Yet we read from the latest UN report that global warming is now an alarming fact, caused, we are told, by our burning fossil fuels. My first - and on reflection, only - response is to light another coal fire, and pray for more global warming, for cold winters, blissful springs, glorious summer and radiant autumns such as those we have experienced in the past year.
UN experts - no doubt of the variety who crowded so purposelessly and so expensively in Rio four years ago - assure us that if global warming is not stopped, unless we cease to bum fossil fuels, temperatures over the next 100 years will increase by 3.5 degrees, which is apparently more than the total increase over the past 10,000 years. One "alarming" prediction from a team of scientists from the universities of Delaware and Minnesota is that New York's annual deaths from heat stroke will increase from 320 to 880.
So What?
Excuse me, but so what? And have you people in Delaware and Minnesota nothing better to do with your time than to predict the deaths of half a thousand New Yorkers? Thousands die of murder and carcrashes and AIDS, and of New York generally, in that city every year. No doubt the 500 extra is a bit of a shame, but since the UN reported that the world population increased last year by 100,000,000, the loss of a few more New Yorkers is no doubt a blow we can take with a certain rugged equanimity.
It needs none of the experts from the UN, or the fine folk from Minnesota and Delaware warning us about the possible deaths of 500 extra New Yorkers a year. to discover the most salutory lesson of all. It is provided by the fate of Mme Jeanne Calment of Arles, who is the world's oldest person.
Now that distinction is not without its merits. At 120 years and 334 days, she remembers Van Gogh buying canvas in her future husband's drapery store. She is also the only person alive who has got the better of her solicitor - he bought her apartment 30 years ago when she was 90 and he was 47, committing himself to a small lump sum and a monthly rent of £230 for the duration of her life, which surely could not go on for much longer.
A Reasonable Age
The poor bastard died on Christmas day, having paid more than three times the value of the flat. By that time, he had made it to 77 - a reasonable age for your fingernails to scrape down the roof tiles. So Jeanne Calment now owns the flat outright. But there's little: enough she can do with it - she has outlived her descendants, her daughter and grandson.
What is more, she is totally deaf and blind - though she appears not to wear dark glasses the whole time, unlike some I could mention. Her motto is: "The good Lord has forgotten me."
If the present health lobby lunatics continue to gain ground, within 50 years there will be thousands of blind, deaf old Jeanne Calments sitting in old people's homes, surrounded by their deaf, blind children, and their deaf, blind grandchildren, all convinced that the good Lord has forgotten them - the nightmare of the world.
Clearly the only solution is more meat and alcohol consumption, more smoking, more global warming, higher seas, and 500 more lucky New Yorkers a year spared the horrors of Calmentian longevity. One trusts that they properly express their gratitude in their wills. Soon.
But if we decide against global warming, if we cry, No to fossil fuels, what available - as opposed to hypothetical - energy sources are there? Solar energy only works in places so hot that you don't need it. Wave energy is a failure. Wind energy ditto. You want nuclear instead? I thought not. Time to turn on the gas fired central heating and kill a few New Yorkers.